Abstract

Growing up in Witbank in the seventies and eighties was traumatic. Like most places in South Africa, ours was community divided along racial and cultural lines. White people stayed in the suburbs, black people in the townships. English-medium schools dreaded rugby games against their Afrikaans counterparts as no local derby of that nature went by without a burly boertjie settling a score on behalf of a great grandmother who may have suffered in a concentration camp decades ago. Running circles around the same Afrikaans boys in the odd soccer match somehow did not make up for the broken noses and black eyes sustained on the stone-ridden, icy Highveld rugby fields..